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Editorial advisory board: The Olympic Games

Posted:
02/08/2014 01:00:00 AM MST

Twenty-one Coloradans traveled to Sochi to compete in the 2014 Winter Olympic games. I wish these local heroes, and all participating athletes, the best possible experience displaying their astounding levels of prowess. I hope they can be spared the black cloud of disgrace that Vladimir Putin's regime has brought upon the Olympics through implementation of fascist anti-gay laws.

Personally, I have plenty demands on my time, and will skip watching the coverage. I'll do my part to send this message to the IOC: selecting a host country that cannot meet minimal standards in human rights will result in loss of viewership and support. Putin's comment that LGBT visitors to Sochi would be safe as long as they "leave kids alone" was so offensive that the thought of watching an event designed to boost his image nauseates me.

In today's Russia, gay men and lesbians are being beaten in the streets while law enforcement looks the other way. People are returning to the closet, hiding from public life, and desperately looking for ways to emigrate. It's profoundly sad to observe a country that gave the world so much in arts, literature, and science in past centuries fall so far behind the advanced world.

But it's heartening to see the outpouring of support for LGBT people in the face of Russia's brutality. President Obama is sending a delegation including openly gay people to the games, and this week's rainbow Google Doodle is delightful.

The hype began seven years ago in Guatemala when Putin nailed the Sochi Winter Olympics as he spoke in both English and French to the IOC. Are there other explanations to hold the Winter Olympics in a subtropical climate along the Black Sea? The media has flooded us with theories of Russian nationalism, Putin pride, a future Black Sea world resort and millions in profits for Russian investors.

The snow-required events scheduled for the mountain town of Krasnaya Polyana has challenges beyond unfinished accommodations, polluted water, inadequate snow-making, and jammed roadways. The high temperature forecast for the next five days at the mountain venue where ski and other snow sports are planned is 43, 43, 46, 46 and 47 degrees F. I hope it snows generously for the sake of the competitors. Yet there is a larger issue for me beyond the medal count and the extravaganza of the ceremonies. For every Olympian who has spent most of a lifetime training for these events there are thousands of athletes who have missed the trip to Sochi by a few tenths of a second or an accidental fall.

A measure of lasting personal victory for each competitor and all who almost made the Games is what each one does in their next chapter in life. Medalist or not, the world needs the potential talent as role models in coaching, in medicine, in youth development, and other humanitarian callings that Sochi may inspire.

I grew up on skis, on the rope-tow under lights at Chautauqua, Buddy Werner a guest at our home. The Winter Olympics charmed us all. Werner, the great U.S. hope had died in an avalanche, but his friends Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga astonished by medaling at Innsbruck. No performance has surpassed Jean Claude Killy and Peggy Fleming at Grenoble.

Victories by "our" athletes have been exhilarating ('80 hockey!), but the jingoism is edgy. Sochi makes me uneasy, not out of misplaced patriotism but the sensibilities of an historian too familiar with Russia.

Culture matters, and national cultures exist, and are durable. Cultural morality is not slippery relativism; it has rights and wrongs. Russia from the first Czar ("Caesar" is the root) has been a brutal place, its nobles' primary pastime stealing things stolen by other nobles, the country held together by secret policemen, the peasantry expecting mistreatment yet preferring a "strong man." Soviet times were different only in labels. The same today: as in the brief reign of Yuri Andropov, a secret policeman is Czar, shamelessly illegitimate.

I wish the athletes well and safety. I wish fair competition despite oligarchs buying medals, notably this year's biathlon, as never since the East German dopers. I trust stony dignity will prevail over odious Putin's homophobia.

But I will struggle to enjoy, this all-time Potemkin Village in every visual, perhaps half the $50 billion cost stolen by new nobility.

The Iceberg Skating Palace at the Sochi Olympics will house some of the most spectacular skating from around the world. But that pristine ice also becomes a clear reflection of universal suffering. Over the last few decades, the Olympics have become a powerful representation of glory and athleticism juxtaposed against international conflict and struggle. The 1972 Munich terrorist attack killing 11 Israeli athletes highlighted the threat of terrorism worldwide. In 1968, two African American athletes brought the issue of racism to the podium — raising their fists in a black power salute during the national anthem. There was the senseless violence against Nancy Kerrigan perpetrated by a rival's husband prior to the 1994 Olympics. We watched China in 2008 flaunt values of superficiality with the substitution of a "cuter" 7-year-old to lip-sync the words of their national anthem. And now we are faced with a new Russian law outlawing "homosexual propaganda" challenging the rights of athletes, spectators, and Russian citizens.

Terrorist threats are a concern and scientists are focusing on global warming and the possibility of high temperatures affecting Russian snow pack.

The Olympics epitomize the beauty of athleticism set against global struggle. Our challenge is to find the balance between appreciating athletic glory and attending to the universality of violence, prejudice, ignorance, and environmental dangers. May Sochi teach us that balance, forgiving ourselves if our footing pales in contrast to the beauty and finesse of a skater's landing of a "quadruple jump."

For something that started out as a bunch of Greek guys running around naked, the modern Olympic Games have become far more complicated than just staging a lot of sporting events. What we now endure is culture clash, political posturing and the occasional terrorist act that, if they don't overshadow the various events, at least cast a pall over them. And black helicopters.

In elementary school during the sixties I was taught that if the communists won the Cold War we'd end up with a government that would take children out of their parents' homes and re-educate them in government-run institutions; we'd all be under constant governmental surveillance and the military would spend all our money on tanks while we went hungry. Thank heavens we won the Cold War.

As Russia has transitioned from communism to more of a capitalistic democracy of sorts, they've come into their own and they're Putin on the Ritz in an all-out attempt to show the world they have arrived as a First World power. Unfortunately, the world is seeing just how inefficient and corrupt a government even in the last throes of communism can be. Rampant graft, shoddy facilities, enormous cost overruns and un-flushable toilets.

President Putin seems to be taking the Games very personally as if his own reputation is on the line. I hope it turns out for him. After all, look what pulling off a successful Olympics did for Mitt Romney.

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